I can't figure this out yet... When I change the uitype to 1 in the DB, the field shows up. I turned on debugging and the field DOES show up in the module calls (like getBlocks) but no dice when set to uitype 10. It DOES show up in the layout manager. I must be doing something incredibly stupid but not sure what so far.
Found it, but is was a REALLY weird error. The value in 'fieldmodulerel' was 2146 for this field. But the ACTUAL field id was 2142. Something got messed up during the field creation. I created a cbupdate record that installed multiple fields in one go, maybe I screwed up somewhere but the field ID mapping between vtiger_field and vtiger_fieldmodulerel was set wrong.